Steven Wagschal

Steven Wagschal

Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Resident Director, Wisconsin-Indiana-Purdue Program in Madrid, 2026-27

Education

  • Ph.D., Columbia University, 1999
  • M.A., Columbia University, 1992
  • B.A., Concordia University, 1991

Affiliations

  • Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
  • Cognitive Science
  • Renaissance Studies Program

About Steven Wagschal

My research explores the history of human-animal relationships, the cultural meanings people have attributed to animals, and changing ideas about animal minds and emotions across time. My most recent book, Jaguar (Reaktion Books, 2026), traces the history of this iconic animal in human culture from ancient times to the present.

Jaguars have long inspired awe, fear, and reverence throughout the Americas and beyond. The book examines both the biology and behavior of this apex predator and the rich cultural history of human-jaguar interactions, drawing on archaeological evidence, visual art, literature, popular culture, and conservation history. It also explores how jaguars have been represented in art, film, and public imagination, as well as contemporary efforts to protect the species and its habitats.

More broadly, my research examines changing ideas about animal cognition and the extent to which historical beliefs about animal thought and emotion align with current scientific understandings of non-human minds. Drawing on literature, history, art, material culture, and the environmental humanities, I investigate how humans have understood, represented, and interacted with non-human animals over time.

In Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis (University of Toronto Press, 2018), I explored the development of ideas about animal cognition from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. In addition to numerous articles and essays, I am the author of The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes (University of Missouri Press, 2006), editor of Lope de Vega's Peribáñez (Cervantes & Co., 2004), and co-editor of Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750 (University of Toronto Press, 2018).

I am currently working on a book about emotional bonds between humans and animals across cultures and historical periods.

Specializations

  • Animal Studies
  • Cognitive Studies
  • Iberian, Caribbean and Latin American and Studies
  • Literature, the Emotions and the Senses
Books
  • Jaguar. Reaktion “Animal” Series (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2026). Forthcoming.
  • Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds: A Cognitive Historical Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. (360 pp)
  • Beyond Sight: Smell, Taste, Touch and Hearing in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200-1750. Co-edited with Ryan Giles. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. (360 pp)
  • The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. (220 pp)
  • Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña. By Lope de Vega.  Editor, with Introduction and Notes. Cervantes & Company No. 14. Newark (DE): Cuesta European Masterpieces, 2004. (154 pp)
Articles
  • "Cervantes’ Animal Menagerie.” In Cervantine Futures: Theorizing Cervantes after the Critical Turn. Eds. Nicholas Jones and Paul Johnson. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2026 (Forthcoming).
  • "Did What Might Have Happened Alter the Course of Literary History? Cervantes’ Use of Counterfactuals in Don Quixote.” In Cervantes's Dialogic Creativity in a Global Context. Eds. Carmela Mattza and Carmen Hsu. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2026 (Forthcoming).
  • “‘Parecía reír el ave’: The Fictive Miguel de Cervantes’s Use of Constructive Anthropomorphism in ‘Las gallinas de Cervantes’ by Ramón J. Sender. ” In A Character Named Cervantes: On Screen, on Stage, and on the Page. Eds. Tatevik Gyulamiryan and Howard Mancing. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025 (83-96).
  • “Human Thinking about Thinking Animals in the Early Modern Spanish and Spanish American World.” In Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind, edited by Isabel Jaen Portillo and Julien Simon, New York: Routledge, 2021.
  • “Animal Training and its Cognitive Implications in the Early Modern Iberian World.” Special Issue on Animal Studies in Romance Notes 60.3 (2020).
  • “The Aesthetics of Disgust in Cervantes and Zayas.” In Beyond Sight: Smell, Taste, Touch and Hearing in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200-1750. Eds. Ryan Giles and Steven Wagschal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018 (94-120).
  • “Sancho’s Art of Memory and Forgetting: A Vanitas of the Mind.” In “Los cielos se agotaron de prodigios”: Essays in Honor of Frederick De Armas. Eds. Kerry Wilks, Christopher Weimer, Benjamin Nelson and Julio Vélez Sainz. Newark (DE): Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2018 (347-58).
  • “Cervantes’ El casamiento engañoso and the Failure of Theory of Mind: The Machiavellian Abilities of Campuzano and Estefanía.” In Self, Other, and Context in Early Modern Spain. Essays in Honor of Howard Mancing. Eds. Isabel Jaén, Carolyn A. Nadeau, and Julien Simon. Newark (DE): Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2017 (57-73).
  • “Smell in the Comedia, Smellin’ the Comedia.” In Making Sense of the Senses. Essays in Comedia Criticism. Eds. Bonnie Gasior and Yolanda Gamboa. Newark (DE): Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2017 (67-80).
  • “Don Quixote, the Skeptical Reader and the Nature of Reality.” In Cervantes in Perspective. Ed. Julia Domínguez. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2013 (139-54).
  • Translated and adapted as “El lector escéptico: el Quijote de Cervantes y las Meditaciones de Descartes.” In Comentarios a Cervantes: Actas selectas del VIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas. Eds. Emilio Martínez Mata and María Fernández Ferreiro. Siero (Asturias, Spain): Asociación de Cervantistas and Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson, 2015.
  • “The Smellscape of Don Quixote: A Cognitive Approach.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 32.1 (2012) 125-162.

Honors & Awards

  • Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Research Travel Grant (2023)
  • MIND Award (Motivación, Inspiración, Dedicación) for Impactful Teaching. Awarded by the senior-year Spanish majors of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society (2022)
  • Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities (IDAH) Faculty Fellowship for my project on “Counterfactuals in early modern literature” (2021-22)
  • MIND Award (Motivación, Inspiración, Dedicación) for Impactful Teaching. Awarded by the senior-year Spanish majors of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society (2020)
  • ASPP Publication Grant for Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2017)
  • Institute for Advanced Study, Collaborative Fellowship Award (2016)
  • Faculty Exchange Program at the University of Seville, Spain (2015)
  • College of Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) grant (2012-13)
  • College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) research fellowship
  • Institute for Advanced Study, Remak New Knowledge Center Seminar Participant (2010-11)
  • Trustees Teaching Award, Indiana University (2006-07)
  • President's Arts and Humanities Initiative Research Grant, Indiana University (2003)
  • National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar, University of Chicago (2003)

Teaching

  • SPAN 803: Graduate Independent Study: The novellas of María de Zayas
  • SPAN 708: Graduate Seminar: Cervantes' Brain: Intention, Interpretation and Don Quixote
  • SPAN 708: Graduate Seminar Madness in Early Modern Spain
  • SPAN 695/495: Plastic Verses: Ekphrasis and Art in Early Modern Spain
  • SPAN 628: Cervantes, Cognition and the Senses
  • SPAN 628: Reading and the Rise of Leisure in Early Modernity
  • SPAN 628: Cervantes and the Literature of Madness
  • SPAN 528: Spanish Literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
  • SPAN 512: Theory and Criticism
  • SPAN 450: Don Quixote
  • SPAN 417: Hispanic Poetry
  • SPAN 407: Cultural Icons of Spain
  • SPAN 328: Introduction to Hispanic Literature
  • COLL S103: Freshman Honors Seminar on Don Quixote  in Translation
  • COLL S103: Freshman Seminar Madness